Roland wrote: > I am citing for example: > > Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? > By Guenter Lewy
[snip] Roland, Thanks, we are probably closer to agreement than it appears. I have a great problem with dishonesty in the service of a higher cause. It usually ends badly. A famous recent example is the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoberta_Menchú [Quote] Controversies about [Menchu's] testimony More than a decade after the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, anthropologist David Stoll conducted a thorough investigation of Menchú's story, researching government documents, reports, and land claims (many filed by Menchú's very own family), and interviewing former neighbors, locals, friends, enemies, and others (although not Menchú) for his 1999 book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Stoll confirmed that Menchú grew up in a Mayan peasant village, which was visited by Marxist guerrillas and then attacked by the Guatemalan army. However, Stoll discovered that Menchú changed many elements of her life, family and village to meet the publicity needs of the guerrilla movement, which she joined as a political cadre after her parents were assassinated. In the book, Menchú maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had founded the peasant movement known as the Committee for Campesino Unity. Instead, Stoll and Rohter found that Vicente Menchú, while poor, was relatively prosperous by local Mayan standards. As leader of his community, he won a 27.53 km² land grant from the Guatemalan government. Unfortunately, his success led to a long-running dispute with his wife's relatives, in the Tum family, who claimed some of the same land. During the late 1970s, when Vicente Menchú's daughter claimed that he was an underground radical political organizer, he was at home in his village of Chimel working with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers. In her 1982 life story, Menchú claimed that she and her family had been forced to work as peons on a distant coastal plantation for eight months of the year, as millions of other impoverished Mayan farmworkers continue to do every year. According to neighbors, however, the family was sufficiently well-off to avoid this fate. Menchú also claimed that her father refused to allow her to attend school, on the grounds that it would turn her into a non-indigenous "ladino" who would forget her Mayan roots, but in reality, Catholic nuns supported her in a succession of schools until she reached the 8th grade. In one episode in her 1982 story, Menchú claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio had been burned alive by Guatemala's military as she and her family were forced to watch in a town plaza. After interviewing local townspeople and reviewing contemporary human rights reports, Stoll concluded that Petrocinio was shot by Army-supported paramilitary groups, rather than burned to death and that Menchú and her family had not witnessed his death. However, Stoll argues that her 1983 story is not a hoax. The reason is that she in fact lost both her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews to the Guatemalan security forces. In response to Stoll's findings, Menchú initially accused him of defending the Guatemalan military and seeking to discredit all victims of the violence, but later she acknowledged making certain changes in her story. The Nobel Committee has dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel prize because of the reported falsifications; however, Professor Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography".[3] According to the Nobel Committee, "Stoll approves of her Nobel prize and has no question about the picture of army atrocities which she presents. He says that her purpose in telling her story the way she did 'enabled her to focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan army.'"[4] [End quote] David Stoll took a huge amount of abuse for exposing the lies in Menchu's "testimonial biography" (I guess that term refers to an autobiography that is full of lies and half-truths). There was a long piece about it in the now defunct journal "Lingua Franca". I felt this treatment was terribly unfair; Stoll did what any scholar with any integrity would do, and should have been lauded for his effort. I also felt that Menchu did a great disservice to those Guatemalans who had suffered under the military regime in Guatemala - and I have read all about it and know how horrible it was - because the revelation of these inaccuracies in her account made it possible for skeptics to discredit her larger message. That is my chief complaint. Lying in the service of some greater truth is almost always exposed, and the cause itself suffers. And often the person who supplies the lies is only being cynically manipulated by power holders; we have seen this again and again in communist regimes, with their model workers and model villages and all the rest. The end result is invariably the same, namely disillusion and disgust when the lies are exposed, and Potemkin Village and Red Flag Canal and Lei Feng turn out to have been big frauds all along. Surely the truth in such cases as the treatment of Native Americans in the US and Guatemala is bad enough that no embroidery is required? John M. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages prior to posting, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
